Re-Evaluating The Purpose of NaNo (& GIFS)

So, I recently joined a group on YWP NaNo called The Super Awesome Writing Club. Its been giving me lots of motivation to write/edit. So I sat down at my computer, opened the NaNo writing program, and stared at my 30K words…

of pure crap.

That’s right, you read that correctly. This is how I turned 30K words into a still shrinking 9K.

I wrote two stories during NaNo. I decided to focus on one called (title in progress) Behind Locker Doors: Middle School Exposed.

…Basically. Why not put my crazy friends to use?

So that already put me down to about 18K.

I was all: “Hey, not too shabby for half of my NaNo WC!”

Happy go lucky-ily, I replaced all my NaNo rambling chapters with the edited chapters, for a grand total of…

6 freakin K.

So I added back in the unedited, in progress chapters… 9K. Just 9K! I was astonished and surprised. What happened to my words of pure gold? I lost half of my word count. Which brings us to the post…

As many of you know, this was my first NaNo. In the middle of the November, I got depressed over the election.

But… but… it’s true, I swear! I had a bad Diposition on everything. My Whole world outlook changed!

Until I snapped myself out of at and stopped acting like a brat. Now, this was around tthe last week and a half. With many marathons and sprints, and even writing 8K in a day…

((but seriously. OMG I WROTE 8K IN A DAY!!!))

I completed my (lowered) goal with 90 minutes to spare.

However, I was in a major time crunch for those 12 days.

So crunched, in fact, I had my character go off on a tangent in the middle of a arguement about the quality of our school’s chocolate milk… a 750 word tangent. And there were many of these…

The 750 words added up and up and up, and left me with what I have here today.

Yep, it’s true. See, I approached NaNo with the idea that all I needed to do was reach my word count goal. I wrote scenes upon scenes that were pointless and I knew I’d need to delete later. Because in my mind, words were good. The actual words didn’t have to be good, but in general, anything to up my word count was fine in my book. Right?

Wrong.

And I haven’t even mentioned all the typos that should’ve been fixed after the writing of each chapter. I blew it off, thinking I’d know what I’d written. But now i have whole paragraphs that I can’t even begin to edit because I have to go through and try to understand my rambling WITH the spelling errors.

Now, I have loads of extra work. I now have tons more editing to do then I would have if i had jsut listened to me. It’s really dimmed my excitement about winning, cause it almost feels like I didn’t win right. I feel like I fell short of what I know I am capable of.

Additionally, in this time I could have been using to re-write my lost words, I have to at least do some preliminary editing on my manuscript for fear all the red and green lines will hurt my pupils.

My WordCount

Anyways, I should probab;y get back to editing… AND MY 6 MONTH BLOGIVERSARY SURPRISE!

Thta’s right, in two days, I’ll have been blogging for half a year. I’ll give you a hint: it’s something you’ve missed… (hopefully, anyways. XD)

16 thoughts on “Re-Evaluating The Purpose of NaNo (& GIFS)”

This year was my…third year doing NaNo? But I’m still learning how to turn it into something useful. I, too, have spent SO much time writing stuff just to get my word count up, only to later abandon the story or find that it’s all crap and need to rewrite, or a combination of the above. Although it can be annoying, I think it’s worth remembering that even just the act of writing is a good start? Like, the more you write — even if it’s not great at first — the better you get at it. It’s, like, a cumulative skill or something. *generally waves hands around and tries to make sense*
And tbh I think it’s fair to be upset by politics, because…yeah. Stuff is crappy. Anyways, I wish you lots of luck in your writing! ❤

3rd year? Impressive to a little first year like me! XD Yes, the act of writing, no matter how bad, did teach me something, I think I’m better at writing now. It really taught me something.
Yeah… the politics part of it sent me into a nosedive.
Thanks, and same to you!

Well, first of all, good job on winning NaNo! That’s awesome! And for writing 8k in a day–that is fantastical! 😀 But the fact that some of your story didn’t make sense…well, it’s fine. The point of NaNo is to finish a story, to write like you’ve never written before–and you did! Revision and editing is painful, but the really great thing is that you noticed that things were bad and now you can fix them to become better! My first NaNo was a mess, but it wasn’t until a year later or something that I realized how many problems it actually had. If you want to look on the bright side of things, haha.

Anyway, good luck with your editing and rewriting! The club sounds awesome…maybe I should go check it out.

Thank you! *indulges in praise for a moment* yeah, that 8K… wow! *becomes humble again*
yeah, when I think about it that way… before nano, the longest story I’d written was 3K. I *googles the word for 10x that* decupled… (wow, strange word) that!
Yes, editing is very painful… my manuscript looks like a bloodbath from my red pen! LOL!
At least I realized, haha.
Yes, you should! It’d be awesome if you joined! 😀
thanks for the comment 🙂

Ah, c’mon, girl! It couldn’t be that bad! (*remembers the first draft of TDS* *makes a choking sound*) Okay … so it could be bad. Like, it could be so bad that you didn’t even give your characters a happy ending because you were so sick of them that you just wanted them all to die and Alice was whiny and Miss Chattoway was just … sad … and you wrote it in first person, which didn’t work because your MC was six (whaaa?) and saw nothing you needed her to see (or at least wasn’t able to put it into six-year-old words) … yeah. XD

I have been considering trashing TDS and giving up writing as-of-late. I mean, seriously. The historical errors are just so huge that I can’t even breathe. I didn’t even know and then someone pointed them out to me … wow. *bounces on a trampoline with a pogo stick* 😛

*bounces with you*
Wow. Now my problems seem small and insignificant. I’m sure you’ll get through it!! NO DO NOT GIVE UO WRITING I WILL WALK ALL THE WAT TO (Oregon?) AND FORCE A PEN INTO YOUR HAND
*chills*
Or maybe send you a nice email. XD
Oh goodness… changing person…
*whispers* the verbs *shudders from horror*

Well, I don’t know … I might not be able to help writing if I tried to … but yeah. It just that most of that book couldn’t have happened in that era for various reasons and … wow. That’s kinda hard for my perfectionist self to swallow, especially as it’s a series and can’t just move one! But I’ll probably survive it. 😉

Mostly is has to do with characters not being so accepting of Miss Chattoway due to (untrue) rumors about her past. I’m starting to feel like I can probably just change a few minor things, though, so hopefully that’ll work. 🙂